Featured Startup Pitch: Online video overload? Siz wants to help with its user-curated platform

By Axel Hauguel, Viewrz/Siz co-founder

Elevator Pitch: The hottest videos from YouTube, Vine, Instagram…in thematic feeds, curated, and ranked by communities.

Product/Service Description

Siz is a new social bookmarking website dedicated to videos created by the French startup Viewrz. Our website helps you to find the best of any video sharing service with user created ‘shortlists.’ Shortlists are theme-based video collections such as ‘Jennifer Lawrence best moments,’ ‘funniest cat videos’ or ‘LeBron James’s monster dunks.’

Users can submit videos, vote for their favorites and follow shortlists, and create their very own profile-based personalized video feed showcasing the things they love to see.

Siz also represents a good opportunity for video creators to build stronger targeted audiences by submitting their videos to communities that share the same interests.

Founders’ Story

I have founded Viewrz in 2011 with Guillaume Rivals at the engineering school Centrale Paris. After our graduation, we’ve integrated the famous Parisian startup accelerator Le Camping.

Our first website (Viewrz.com) was a tool to chop and excerpt clips from YouTube videos in order to share the moments that really matter onto social networks. Now based in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, we launch Siz.io, the new social bookmarking website for videos.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Siz lets the different communities choose which content is relevant. I really think this is the perfect place to enjoy the best video dedicated to a topic. That’s why we target them where they are, all around the web, and especially on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

On another hand, we’ve created this platform to enjoy best videos online, but also to help video creators to get more views and to create more engagement around their content. That’s why we plan to build strong partnerships with YouTubers and Viners.

Market Opportunity

We’re the first social bookmarking platform dedicated to videos from YouTube, Vine, Instagram, LiveLeak, Vimeo, Twitch, or Dailymotion, but I’m sure 2014 will see the emergence of several video curation platforms.

Video content is king on the Internet, and not just on YouTube. Fifty percent of Internet traffic this year was video. In 2013, 92 percent of mobile device users share mobile videos with others thanks to new video apps like Vine and Instagram (five tweets-per-second contain a Vine link, and 150 million Instagram users can now share videos).

How We Differentiate From the Competition

We are attentive to video length and push users into submitting videos as short as possible. To help them shorten their videos the site allows users to chop a specific segment, sharing only the most important section.

Moreover, we are the only video curator which embeds Vine and Instagram videos.

Business Model

We plan to make partnerships with brands, providing them a very targeted audience on each shortlist; but it will not be traditional advertising. User experience is the most important for us. Therefore, we are focused on user acquisition for now.

Current Needs

We’re looking for a second round in order to hire a Javascript developer and video curators.

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Headquarters: Paris